The Shards

by Bret Easton Ellis

MANY YEARS AGO I REALIZED THAT A BOOK, a novel, is a dream that asks itself to be written in the same way we fall in love with someone: the dream becomes impossible to resist, there’s nothing you can do about it, you finally give in and succumb even if your instincts tell you to run the other way because this could be, in the end, a dangerous game—someone will get hurt.

For a few of us the first ideas, images, the initial stirrings can prompt the writer to automatically immerse themselves in the novel’s world, its romance and fantasy, its secrets. For others it can take longer to feel this connection more clearly, ages to realize how much you needed to write the novel, or love that person, to relive that dream, even decades later.

If we want to connect the act of writing with the metaphor of romance then I had wanted to love this novel and it seemed to be finally offering itself to me and I was so tempted, but when it came time to consummate the relationship I found myself unable to fall into the dream.

and it was perhaps the casually hedonistic world of adults we were eagerly entering that opened a door that allowed Robert Mallory and the Trawler and the events of that fall to greet us—it later seemed, at least to me, an invitation we thoughtlessly sent out completely unaware of the price we would end up paying.

Thom waited for Jeff, and after Ron passed out the two of them headed to Jeff’s father’s place in Malibu, where they stayed up the rest of the night and finished the half-gram Ron gave Jeff and hit the beach in their wet suits at dawn to surf the waves cresting along the misty morning shores before they put on their school uniforms and made the long drive to Buckley, taking Sunset all the way to Beverly Glen and then over the hill into Sherman Oaks.

Beyond the manicured stables painted white and pine green was a forest of trees blocking the view of the Pacific—you could see small patches of glassy blue but everything seemed ensconced and still, nothing moved, as if we were encased in a kind of plastic dome.

Terry was also gay—not openly but discreetly—and he was married to Liz Schaffer, who was lost in so much privilege and pain that I wondered if Terry’s gayness registered with her at all anymore.

The boy aroused something primal in me that I had never felt before—I wanted him immediately, I needed to be his friend, I had to make contact, I had to see him naked, I had to own him.

There was no suspicion about Ryan Vaughn among our peers in the student body because Ryan was a dude, a bro, chill. He just resembled a cool loner rather than someone secretly marginalized but I knew that he was playing a game by lying low until he could get out of high school, escape L.A., find a college far away and start over, reinventing himself, like me. That was his plan. That was my plan.

STEVEN came down to the pool area and started taking photos at Debbie’s request. No one really posed—because we were already posing,

The matching mutilations that the victims suffered were not fully revealed to the press and it was almost a year after the last girl was found at the end of 1981 until most of these details were ultimately known—in a pre-digital world secrets were more easily kept; in fact, secrets were the norm in a pre-digital world.

No one knew yet that Julie Selwyn would be the third victim of a serial killer that had been operating in L.A. County since the summer of 1980 when Katherine Latchford disappeared mid-June. It wasn’t until the third week of our senior year that the Trawler would be named, introduced to us and emerge as a character in the city’s narrative.

The Trawler focused on someone whose family had pets or the victim had a pet themselves (and it didn’t matter if it was a dog, a cat, a bird, a snake in one instance, mice, a rabbit, a guinea pig) and the pet would disappear, and not only the victim’s pet, but other pets in the neighborhood where the victim resided would vanish as well in advance of the home invasion when the victim was attacked. Before he committed his assaults often three animals, in the same neighborhood, would ultimately be sacrificed by the Trawler, and it wasn’t until the late fall of 1981 that we learned what the reason was—what he ultimately did with their carcasses and why he needed them.

The victims who survived these initial attacks, the ones in May and early June, before Katherine Latchford was abducted—people who had been roped and bound, prone on their bedroom and living-room floors, sometimes stripped by the figure clad in black and wearing the overlarge ski mask—said that whoever had attacked them was “weeping” when he left the residence after he had apparently been sated: a few of the attacks were sexual in nature but most were not. When the first murder happened, and the home invasions and the assaults picked up in mid-December after the long lull of a three-month hiatus, many people who survived the next wave of invasions commented that the attacker hadn’t cried at all; it was almost as if he had gained confidence, a strength, and perhaps by committing his first murder had become emboldened.

Matt seemed to have no capability for basic socializing, and at first I wasn’t sure if this was because of how stoned he was all the time or if he was just inherently shy, but I soon realized that he simply didn’t care about the social contract we had all bought into—he didn’t even seem aware of his surroundings—and there was something rebellious and almost punk about this stance even though it wasn’t conscious: he simply didn’t care about how things worked; in fact he seemed defiantly un-self-conscious.

I didn’t want anything from him except his full-lipped mouth surrounded by light razor stubble, his muscular thighs, the chest with defined pectorals that tapered into a tier of abs, the small line that crept up from the patch of brown pubic hair and ended at the knot of his navel, and the long cock that jutted out from that patch, and his ass, pale and tight and dimpled, very lightly dusted with blond down. At first it hardly mattered to me what resided within this form.

A seventeen-year-old boy (I’d be eighteen in March) tooling across Mulholland in a convertible Mercedes dressed in a private-school uniform and wearing Wayfarers is an image from a certain moment of empire that I was, at times, self-conscious about—did I look like an asshole? I’d briefly wonder—before thinking: I look so cool I don’t care.

The atmosphere was hushed, everything seemed embalmed in that dream I walked into: the flat green carpeting I was standing on could have been a lake, the hum of the air conditioning was the distant wind before a storm, the handsome students in uniform were robots, everyone talking scripted dialogue in low voices.

To Debbie, I had realized over the summer, the constant shrugging on my part suggested a kind of masculinity—a strong, silent type I was supposedly embodying when, in fact, I just didn’t care.

It surprised me that being back on campus reignited my contempt so suddenly and doomed any of the optimism I’d been feeling the past few weeks. This was not going to be the happy year I’d foolishly envisioned and hoped for over the summer; whatever excitement had been caused by my own faulty wiring. I realized too late while standing in the courtyard below the Pavilion on that first morning back, that I hadn’t been paying enough attention to the actual script.

I was a storyteller and I liked decorating an otherwise mundane incident that maybe contained one or two facts that made it initially interesting to be retold in the first place but not really, by adding a detail or two that elevated the story into something legitimately interesting to the listener and gave it humor or surprise or shock, and this came naturally to me. These weren’t lies exactly—I just preferred the exaggerated version.

Ryan was laughing, describing something with his hands, seemingly enjoying himself—he was genuinely animated, and not pretending, and I wanted to be sitting next to him in that moment: when he seemed to be real. What happened to those days last spring when we sat away from everyone else, lost in our secret flirtation, on the verge of sharing how we actually felt about each other?

You could softly smell him: it was soap or lotion or shampoo, it came somewhere from his hair, his body, his skin. It was cedar, sandalwood, as if he had just walked through a forest of citrus. There was smokiness to the scent as well, ashy, a simmering bonfire on a deserted beach, the salt air mingling with the evaporating flames. Or this is how I remember it.

I remember that clearly even though I don’t necessarily recall the specifics of the dialogue from that lunch, just the generalities of Robert’s story, his supposed outline, the official narrative he wanted to push. Nothing at that initial lunch directly hinted at what would happen to us later that fall but, if I’m looking back, there were clues everywhere.

I had imagined that whoever Robert turned out to be was probably going to get marginalized because he wouldn’t have enough time to become close with anybody in the hermetic world of our senior class, but I automatically realized upon meeting him this wasn’t going to be the case: His looks would open every single door. They would also hide any flaws he might be harboring. His beauty would let him get away with anything. I just stared at him.

Thom interrupted and asked Robert if he’d ever been to the school before. “No,” Robert said. “This was all kind of a last-minute thing.” He threw that line out as if it didn’t warrant an explanation. It landed and he moved on.

Robert had gone through this quick backstory, filled with undercurrents of pain and loss, rejection and a dead parent, almost good-naturedly, as if it happened to someone else. The info might have been presented earnestly but it seemed, by one point, rehearsed—as if it was something Robert remembered but hadn’t necessarily lived through. He offered this information in a weirdly emotionless way that verged on the hollow.

“Did you see The Shining at the Village Theater in Westwood when it first came out?” I asked. Robert turned to me, clutching his crumpled schedule, and said with a complete blankness, “No,” and nothing else. I would get used to this blank look: detached with a barely concealed insectile urgency whirring behind the innocent gaze.

The boy I’d fantasized about in a variety of ways since that May morning in 1980 was the boy who turned out to be Robert. And on that first day of school we didn’t know anything about how his mother really died, or the rape of his stepsister, the suicide attempt, or Robert Mallory’s stint, during what should have been the last term of his junior year at Roycemore, in a mental institution outside Jacksonville, Illinois.

I was numb to everything except for a flash of nudity in an anonymous hotel suite.

“I need your reassurance, Bret, about us.” For a very brief moment I was on the verge of admitting something to her—a truth, my real feelings. But then I realized with an acid awareness that I didn’t want to complicate the year because everything had been set up, the narrative was in play, we were already enacting our roles; there was nowhere else to go—and I wanted to keep hiding the real Bret.

The fantasy we were creating almost cracked for me because of how real it seemed to her. And I realized that in order for this to work I had to stop thinking Debbie deserved someone better. I had to believe that she deserved me.

I had turned the night around from where it was supposed to be heading—with friends ordering pizza from Santo Pietro’s and having fun planning a party, the music, the food, who else to invite outside of the Buckley circle—into what everyone now assumed was my own paranoid cave, creating a scenario that didn’t connect with the facts they thought they knew. I realized I had to defend myself, so I brought up what happened Tuesday afternoon on Ventura Boulevard.

I pulled one of the massive double front doors open next to where the name of the restaurant was written in small pink handwritten neon, a playful touch hinting that Trumps didn’t take itself so seriously; Trumps was about L.A. and artifice and a new kind of freewheeling California Cuisine—it was supposed to be fun.

Trumps had a gay vibe—I knew that the chef was gay, the big investors were gay, the designer of the space was gay, all or most of the waiters were gay, even the location was gay: smack in the middle of what was known as Boystown. The entire aesthetic had an undercurrent of fuck you to the straight status quo and I suddenly felt slightly uncomfortable being there at the center of it.

The only lights that guided you through the space were the flickering doorways, where videos played, and the entrance, where Junior sat, which acted like a beacon in the darkness. Someone brushed against me, then disappeared into the mist, and it could have been a ghost.

This is what gave the song an added tension: Kim remained unsmiling through the soaring chorus—she was withdrawn, dead-eyed, even drugged. Maybe she knew where she was, or maybe she didn’t know, maybe she could have been anywhere—this was what became so suggestive in the video. She was offering an invitation but she didn’t care if you came or not, because she could always find somebody else. She was radiating that numbness-as-a-feeling aesthetic I was so drawn to and trying to perfect in Less Than Zero and I was thrilled seeing it embodied in the poppiest of artifacts.

I suddenly thought again: as a writer, you’re always hearing things that aren’t there.

Another question I almost immediately asked myself: why would a mirror in a bathroom be almost completely ensconced in darkness at a nightclub for young people—girls who wanted to touch up their makeup, boys who wanted to check out their hair? But maybe there was a point to the space that I wasn’t grasping yet, maybe it was partly a prank, the anti-scene, the wry commentary on how you could make anything seem fashionable to L.A.’s young and hip if you just made it exclusive enough. Maybe the space was performance art conjured up by older hipsters taking advantage of the naïveté of the city’s youth.

I found a room where I sat down and I remember being calmly elated: this was something I could write about, this was an incident I could place into the narrative of the novel I was working on, and I began to think of ways to embellish it—paint it darker, give it an eerier vibe, push evil. I thought about adding the stench of shit from the pile of excrement the hippie had laid out, the knife he was now clutching, a deeper wound inflicted upon the girl, more blood. I wasn’t even looking at the video projected on the wall because I was dreaming a different one.

There were the eighties video staples that hadn’t become clichés yet: a fancy party in an embassy, a candelabra on a white baby grand beneath a chandelier, martinis drunk by grotesques shot in fish-eye lens, a tarantula crawling across the face of a passed-out guest, an ominous child playing a violin. There were lovers discovered by paparazzi, and someone shot to death on the grand curving staircase of an opera house. The feeling has gone, the singer cried out. It means nothing to me. This means nothing to me. The final chorus climaxes with a cymbal crash and it always gave me chills. Oh, Vienna.

The song was too slow, it was too long, and yet it moved us and like the best pop songs it was an abstraction, poetry that could mean anything to anyone—it was a launching pad for our separate longings but it was obviously a metaphor about loss, and this was something all of us shared, whether it was the pain Thom Wright’s parents’ divorce caused him, with the father he was closer to now long gone across the continent, or the alcoholism that was destroying Jeff Taylor’s father, or my own defeats tied to the actor I often played and didn’t want to and who my own father still ignored even as I kept trying to enact the part of a son I thought he wanted.

A weekend I remember so clearly because of the freedom that was being promised became a weekend, instead, shrouded with doubt: I would always remember a wall streaked with blood in a high-rise condo and the adjacent balcony splashed with it, I realized.

I remember the weekend with Ryan Vaughn in September of 1981 at the empty house on Mulholland, because it was the last weekend untainted by the past. The basic reason why the weekend happened was, I realize in retrospect, sex, and the hope tied to the sex. It was about desire in its simplest form, and a purity that I would never experience again.

The sex wasn’t based on anything except an overwhelming need and that’s why it was so intense that weekend: it just had to happen, there was a physical logic to it—it wasn’t about dreams or friendship or love or romance. It was, in fact, methodical and we were prepared. We knew this wasn’t a fantasy: beach towels were laid across my bed so we wouldn’t stain the sheets with baby oil, this was the first time I showed Ryan how to use an enema, we took turns fucking with a small vibrator I’d bought at the Sex Shoppe on Ventura Boulevard before we carefully guided our own cocks into each other.

I had never really heard a hint of this class-consciousness in any of the conversations that we’d had last spring or over the summer. But maybe, I thought, he actually had shared this with me at one point and I just hadn’t noticed, too lost in his beauty to fully hear him and grasp who Ryan really was besides just a body, a form, an erotic trophy I wanted to win.

There was an initial narrative that I was creating against the backdrop of these sickening crimes that felt like being in a movie, especially when I’d play Fleetwood Mac’s “I’m So Afraid” in the empty house on Mulholland high on Valium, wandering along the veranda, imagining someone was watching me, accompanied by Lindsey Buckingham’s wailing guitar solo echoing over the cliff side and the eucalyptus and jacaranda trees, but it couldn’t sustain itself and soon I was buying weed from Jeff Taylor in order to fall asleep more easily, numbing myself from the fear that would descend in the moments after I got into bed and turned off the lights, imagining sounds everywhere, the Trawler breaking in, because it was your turn now, the ski mask above me would say in that awful drawling voice, eyes wide with madness.

But maybe in Southern California we were burned out by the number of serial killers roaming the landscape throughout the seventies and into the eighties, crisscrossing each other on the freeways and through the canyons and boulevards, hunting for victims hitchhiking at the beaches and waiting at bus stops, hanging out at gas-station diners up the coast and stumbling drunk out of bars, from Glendale to Oceanside, Westminster to Redding, Cathedral City to Long Beach, strewing mutilated corpses, extravagantly tortured with steel pipes and broken glass, in dumps and sand dunes and forests and along Highway 395—a time before video surveillance and cellphones and DNA profiling, when serial killers were allowed to be cavalier and bountiful: the number of murders committed by just one or a duo could hit twenty or thirty, fifty or sixty, during that particular decade.

Where was the tangible participant, the willing boyfriend, I had decided to become for the rest of the year? Where was the actor going along with the pantomime? But I managed it effortlessly—I

How had we arrived at a point when what we wanted to say to each other was now floating in the pauses that dominated the conversation?